


When the Devil Talks a Gentleman

by loudle



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Depressed Harry, Depression, M/M, Sad Ending, Sad Harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 11:06:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1345177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loudle/pseuds/loudle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry is infinity. Louis is lost in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Devil Talks a Gentleman

He was like something out of a movie. An overrated, cliché film from the 1980’s come to life before one’s eyes.  
He was tall, lean, and awfully handsome. Green eyes were framed with rows of dark eyelashes; a stark contrast against the milky white of his skin. His lips were thick and red, like cherry lollies melting in the heat of a warm summer’s day. They always looked so delicious- so tempting. It took every ounce of Louis’s self-control to keep these desires at bay.  
In his eyes there were stars, and through those, one could see constellations. It was almost as if he could navigate you with the glittering lights embedded in the night sky held within his eyes, and truth be told, he probably could, if he really wanted to. He could tempt the purest ones; unmask the closeted sinners with ease, all with just an upward flicker of the corner of his mouth, and a glint in his forest green eyes. He was every sane human being’s lucid dream, though he was quite the reality to Louis.  
Silken chocolate curls were pushed back from his face atop his head; the kind you just want to run your fingers through. On his arms and torso, black thread was sewn into porcelain in intricate patterns and dramatic contrast in hue. He had art painted across his body, but what intrigued Louis the most were the words “Things I Can,” and “Things I Can’t,” engraved into opposing arms, right above each elbow. It hi-lighted his mystifying grace, the puzzling occupancy that entered the room every time that he did. No one could pinpoint what it was about him that was so evasive, so void of familiarity. Then again, no one had the nerve to dig their claws in deep enough to rip open this enigma and see what flowers bloomed inside of his chest.  
The enigma was named Harry Styles.  
Harry Styles was wicked, in the most horrific way possible.  
His heart was locked in a cast iron cage, cold and hard against any warmth that tried to seep through the cracks. He had empty space where a heart should be, yet the words on his lips told another story. He spoke in freeform poetry, similes and metaphors falling from his lips naturally, as though his manner of speech was so ordinary that he might as well be reading the grocery list aloud.  
Louis, on the other hand, was painfully unremarkable.  
His skin was slightly tanned, black ink staining his own body, though not nearly as exquisite as that painted upon the porcelain doll. He had soft, feathery hair, a lighter shade of brown that swooped up from his forehead in a neat quiff. He had cerulean eyes that crinkled at the edges when he smiled. His lips were thin, pink, and chapped; barely bubblegum compared to the plump cherry flavored candies adorning Harry’s lovely face.  
Louis was not insecure. He was perfectly confident and excessively social, and maybe that’s why he was so easily flustered by the cat-eyed boy.  
He always knew just what to say at just the right time, never missing a beat in any conversation, and if someone else faltered, he graciously picked up for them, carrying on from there. With Harry, there was no conversation. He never missed a beat, only because there was no beat to keep up with. Harry truly was a freeform poem in the human form. He was indescribable; not quite tame, but not uncouth. He had the mouth of a poet but the mind of a madman (then again, what’s the difference?). He wasn’t quite a person, but a state of mind.  
Why do pretty boys have thistle growing in the flowerbeds hidden inside of their chests? What a tragic concept to unfold.

//

The first time he actually had a moment of oh shit in this utterly glorious mess was on a Thursday, sitting in the back of Harry’s truck under a gray sky, March winds chilling the tips of his fingers. Together they had to write a presentation on the different forms of irony for their English class. Louis thought the entire situation was a perfect example.  
Why were they in the back of his pickup? Harry said he thought more clearly outside, and Louis couldn’t form a coherent response to oppose this statement if his life depended on it. Harry currently lay flat on his back in the bed of the truck, staring up at the clouds moving across the sky like steam from a cup of tea. “Harry, we really need to do this,” Louis spoke with nerves clear as day in his voice that was pitched a notch higher than usual. “So, like, ironies are-“  
“No,” Harry said simply, sitting up from where he had been on his back. This was progress. It was just about the first word he had spoken to Louis since the standard, “Hello,” and “How are you?”, if he even said as much. Louis watched as he slipped a carton of cigarettes out of the pocket of his denim jacket. He slid one of the slender coffin nails out of its case, Louis watching closely as the simple action seemed a delicate task at the hands of the gentle giant. He stuck the cancer stick between his teeth and lit up with a small purple lighter. All oxygen was sucked from his body at the sight of cherry lips forming little O’s around rings of smoke that floated above his head before dissipating into the air. His body felt like it was on fire. He wondered if the lighter fluid had leaked into his lungs. “Do you want a smoke?” came the low drawl from bright red lips.  
Louis watched his grandfather fade away in the most painful of ways, slowly with a generous pinch of agony, from emphysema after years of smoking. He promised himself he would never put a single cigarette to his lips.  
“Okay,” he breathed, reaching for the carton. Harry pulled it out of his reach, shaking his head.  
“I asked you if you wanted it. That’s a yes or no question.”  
“I said okay,” Louis said, reaching for the carton again, only to have it pulled farther from his grasp.  
“That’s a settlement. You won’t turn the opportunity down, but you could do without it. You do that a lot,” he said, and a delicate stream of smoke rose into the sky from behind pretty lips and white teeth.  
“Do what?” Louis asked, and Harry looked up at him from beneath thick eyelashes.  
“You settle. You never tell anyone what you want, so you never get it,” he said, flicking the ashes from the cigarette out the side of his truck. Absently, Louis hoped there was no dry grass there. Forest fires were never good.  
“No I don’t,” Louis said defensively, scowling at the porcelain doll with the dragon’s breath.  
“Do, too,” Harry said around the slender lung dart. “You always say words like okay, alright, and that’s fine. You never say yes, or definitely, or of course, and then you wonder why no one takes what you have to say seriously. In your mind, they overlook your opinions, because they are a bunch of haughty arseholes, which they probably are, but that’s not why. They overlook your opinions because you don’t express them. You never get what you want because you don’t ask for it. No one fulfills your needs because you don’t tell anyone what they are.” Another gentle stream of smoke rose blissfully into the afternoon air. “Now,” Harry said, fag between his teeth as he spoke, “do you want a smoke?” He held the carton open, right within Louis’s reach. Blue eyes met green with an unfamiliar ferocity.  
“Yes, I want a smoke,” Louis said firmly, grabbing the carton, taking a cigarette, and tossing the package back to the poet. He put the bone in his mouth, and lit up with the little purple lighter.   
He breathed in his first puff of dragon’s breath, and exhaled in a furious fit of coughs. A cloud of smoke hovered above the two of them from where Harry sat back, laughing at his inexperience. That’s when he knew he was setting himself up for failure.

//

The second time was in an empty parking lot on a Saturday night. It was warm, now that March had finally melted into April. Stars twinkled in the night sky like tiny diamonds engulfed in deep black velvet. A slight breeze rushed through the trees, the only sign that any possible chill could be afoot. In the middle of the lot, Harry Styles lay on his back, staring up at the diamonds that matched his eyes. The universe was winking at him, and he was playing hard to get.  
“What are you doing here?” Louis said, standing over his long body, flat against the concrete, a bottle of gin beside his head. “It’s 1:30 in the morning.”  
“What am I doing here? Well what are you doing here?” he retorted, “It’s 1:30 in the morning.”  
“Well I-“  
“I didn’t actually care for an answer.”  
“Alright.”  
“Lay down,” he ordered, though it came out more as a question. Louis obliged, lying beside him, about half a foot away. “Stop looking at me and look at what’s incredible, here.”  
But you’re incredible, Louis wanted to say, so he did. “You’re pretty incredible, Harry Styles.” Harry didn’t look at him. He kept his focus on the sky.  
“That’s debatable,” he said, and he thought for a moment. “Not the stars, though. You see, I’m able to be explained. A man and a woman were attracted to each other, and I was subsequently the product of that. It’s the age-old story; boy meets girl, condom doesn’t quite meet prick, sperm meets egg, and what do you know? Soon Anne and Des are going to be parents. Isn’t that wonderful?” His words left a bitter taste on his tongue, so he washed it down with alcohol. Louis wanted to reprimand him for drinking while lying down, but instead, he kept quiet. After Harry had wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his dark flannel, a smile formed on his fruit punch lips. “Not the stars, Louis; never the stars. The stars are unexplainable. What are they? How did they come to be? No one knows. The star is the ultimate enigma. I wish I was a star. No one could tell me who I was or what I was supposed to be. Wouldn’t that be nice?”  
Louis hummed in agreement. Harry sighed in nostalgia.  
“When I was little, you know, before I was “poisoned” my mother likes to say, my dad used to take me camping every weekend during the summer,” Harry said after a long silence had passed.  
“Oh yeah?” Louis inquired, receiving an affirming hum in confirmation. “That sounds lovely.”  
“It sure was,” Harry said, and a breathy laugh fell from his lips. “I used to lie out on a blanket with him, just like this, and I would try to count the stars. I would spend hours trying to get every single one. It was my life’s mission to figure out exactly how many stars were in the sky.”  
“Did you ever find out?”  
Harry laughed. “No. That’s the problem with me, I suppose. I’m too focused on the impossible, because the bare reality of it is that I will never in my life ever be able to count the exact number of stars in the sky. That wouldn’t be a problem, having high aspirations, was the reasoning behind this mindset different,” he said, and Louis looked over at him.  
“What’s the reasoning?”  
“I chase these dreams for the sole reason that I know that they’re impossible. I want to prove the laws of nature wrong. I keep challenging myself with contests I can never win, and as little ambition as I seem to have, I have enough to be constantly fighting wars within myself.”  
Louis was silent. Harry laughed, but it didn’t sound quite right, like a guitar slightly out of a tune.  
“Don’t ever try to become a star, Louis. You push people away, and you push all your feelings out of your mind because you can’t afford them. Next thing you know, you’re the richest man in the world, and surely you can afford them now, but as it turns out, feelings just aren’t in your market. Of course, you’re only human. You have to feel, according to your nature. Do you know what feeling you’re stuck with when you live your life like that?” Louis doesn’t answer. Harry continues, regardless. “Sadness, and it never leaves. Even when you think you’re happy, you feel empty inside afterwards for being as shallow as to derive joy from something so indifferent and arbitrary as one single moment in time. It’s a sadness that stays with you forever. It harvests inside of your bones, and rots you from the inside out. You are a walking corpse, because the only thing keeping you from death is the thought that you don’t deserve the relief.”  
He took another swig from the bottle of gin.  
“God, I’m fucking smashed. If I ever ask, I never told you a thing, okay?”  
“Okay.”  
But it wasn’t.

//

The third time was under Harry’s back porch after a school football game on a Wednesday night. They always scheduled games in the middle of the week, saying it gave the students motivation; something to get them through the long five day period. This didn’t quite apply to Louis, since he wasn’t exactly a sporty guy, more into art, but this was the first home game of the season. Nearly every student in the school attended this game, and the ones that didn’t were either oblivious, or just utterly indifferent. Harry was the heart and soul of indifference, but Louis still thought he would be there.  
He wasn’t.  
Louis looked absolutely everywhere for a familiar pair of green eyes, but they were nowhere to be found. He asked his fellow students, “Have you seen Harry?” and most of them didn’t even know who he was talking about (not a surprise, Harry avoided human interaction like the plague), and the ones who did just shook their heads. Louis felt his heart pounding in his chest, heavy like the pendulum in a grandfather clock.  
Why was he so worried? It was awfully illogical for him to be so nervous. Harry barely even attended school itself, never mind non-mandatory events. All the same, the nagging in the back of his mind wouldn’t go away, so he figured he would.  
He got into his car, and started the drive to Harry’s house. It wasn’t a long ride, maybe 15 minutes at most, but minutes felt like hours, at that moment. Years passed as he finally reached the house on the corner of the street, and pulled into the long driveway. He nearly fell out of his car as he rushed towards the large front door. He knocked loud and hard, but received no answer. He tried this multiple times, having to swallow his heart that was caught in his throat in order to breathe. Why was nobody answering the door? Harry’s car was parked in the driveway, so he was obviously home.  
Faintly, Louis remembered him saying something about the back door having a key under the threshold. If he had ever bolted somewhere quicker in his life, it would be a serious shock.  
In the backyard, there was a raised wooden deck that led to the back door. He bounded up the steps, but as he stopped at the door, he heard a faint, unrecognizable sound. It could have been anything. An animal, the wind rustling the trees, or maybe even his imagination, but something made him stop and listen. It was quiet, nearly inaudible, but definitely there. It sounded like.. Crying. It sounded like someone was crying, and it was coming from beneath his feet. Slowly, he made his way back across and down the stairs, and rounded the front of the deck. He ducked his head under, and sitting below, crouched in a ball, was Harry. It was getting dark, so Louis wasn’t able to see him very well, but he was shaking. Harry, the boy whose thoughts on feelings only consisted of I really don’t give a fuck was in a ball underneath his porch, sobbing into his knees.  
“Harry?” Louis spoke with the most gentle inquiry. Harry didn’t halt his weeping in the slightest. “Are you okay?”  
Harry looked up at him, and even in the dark, the tear tracks were obvious, glistening in patterns down his cheeks. “Am I ever really okay, Louis?” he countered, and Louis swallowed thickly. “Was I ever okay? I find myself pondering this morbid thought much too often to be healthy.” He leant his elbows on his knees and knit his fingers through his hair. “Was there ever a time where I could wake up in the morning without dread interlocked with the fingers of my heart? Did these fingers ever outstretch to meet something other than despair? Or have I always gone hand-in-hand with hopelessness?”  
“Yes, there was,” Louis said, and Harry shook his head. “When you used to go camping with your dad, and you used to count all the stars in the sky, and-“  
“Try,” Harry interrupted him. “The keyword there is try.” Louis fell silent, lowering himself to his knees, watching the boy sitting across from him carefully. He had never seen Harry cry, and never planned on it. Harry wasn’t one for being emotional. The only time Harry had ever been sober and showed emotion was when he saw Louis cry. He held him in his arms for hours, insisted on sleeping over just to make sure he was okay. Louis wasn’t sure he could ever possibly be more in love with somebody.  
“You still gave it a shot, didn’t you? You’d count all the lovely stars that aren’t even half as lovely as-“  
“Most stars are dead, you know.” Louis blinked a few times before responding.  
“Well, they look pretty alive to me.”  
“I bet I do, too,” Harry said softly, and Louis felt his heart climbing back up into his throat.  
“You do,” he managed, nodding his head, and Harry smiled in the saddest fashion possible for what was normally such a cheerful gesture.  
A long silence was shared between the two of them, the only sound being the leaves on the trees whispering secrets through the air. Louis strained to hear what they were saying, if maybe they could let him know how someone so beautiful could be so mind-numbingly sad. They didn’t tell.  
“Louis, could you do me a favor,” the deep voice finally broke the silence. He slowly uncurled himself from the fetal position he had been sitting in, and lessened the distance between them.  
“Of course,” he said, and Harry took his small hands in his large ones, rings on every finger cool in comparison to the warmth of his porcelain.  
“Kiss me,” he said, rising up to his knees so that they were directly face-to-face. Louis nodded.  
“Okay,” he said, inching just a little bit closer.  
“Okay?” Harry said, closing his eyes, and pressing his cherry gumdrops to Louis’s strips of bubblegum.  
“Okay,” he said against his rose petal lips.

//

The fourth time was in Church, the first and last time Harry would ever be seen inside. How sad it was for such an event to have to take place for him to show up.  
Louis knelt at the head of the wooden box, and looking down at the lips that used to be so pretty, so full of mystery and thoughtfulness, there was nothing. They had lost some of their vibrant color, now barely even a warm pink. His eyes were closed, and Louis almost reached out to peek behind his lids one last time, just to get a final glimpse of the set of looking glass that would forever have a view into the left side of his chest.  
It seemed ironic to be putting him in such a confined little box to spend the last of eternity inside. Harry was the universe, all the galaxies in one, and they were stuffing him inside of this tiny rectangular prism, and calling it a place to honor him? Louis thought that to be quite inappropriate.  
The world was Harry’s memorial. He was endless wonder and surprise in the truest form. No one knew what he was or where he was going, ever. He was a tornado, a tidal wave, a hurricane, totally unpredictable and so terrifying in only the worst way. You never knew what he was thinking, and even if he told you, there was no way you’d even be riding a wavelength anywhere close enough to decode his cryptic metaphors. He was a mystery, but his story ended with a bottle of gin, a pickup truck, and a lot of self hatred. Maybe a foot a little too heavy on the gas, and not nearly enough on the brake.  
Harry was infinity, and infinity never ends. He is infinity, and Louis loved him. He loves him.  
Why did pretty boys have to have thistle growing in the gardens within their ribcages to hide the roses inside? More importantly, why did the roses have to die?  
What a tragic concept to have ever been unfold.

**Author's Note:**

> omg i was pretty excited for this one it's only my second complete work published eVER so that's really cool i think i'm not sure how it turned out but i hope you loved it !! thanks for reading !!


End file.
